Reënacting the Tompkins Square Riots

The first time I saw a riot in Tompkins Square Park, in New York’s East Village, was a hot summer night, in 1988, when I was twelve years old. Growing up on the fifth floor of a St. Marks Place brownstone, I was usually able to sleep through any street noise. But this street noise was exceptional. Actually, it was deafening. There were helicopters, anarchist squatters flinging bottles, even policemen on horseback. Like people all up and down the street, I leaned out the window and watched what looked like the end of the world.

The second time I saw a riot in Tompkins Square Park was on a recent Thursday, in May, at the age of thirty-eight. I’d read on my favorite East Village blog, E.V. Grieve, that there would be a filmed reënactment, and so I met up that night with my friend Jason. The first time he saw the riots was when he was thirteen and visiting his older sister on Avenue A. “I have vivid memories of looking out the window at an insane face-off between cops on horses and a huge crowd, staring each other down twenty feet away from each other, like some kind of Civil War military battle.” And yet he still moved here.

“I’m by the fire,” Jason texted me when I arrived in the neighborhood around ten P.M. I found him on Seventh Street between Avenues A and B, on the south side of the park. He was looking up at a brick building, his back to a controlled fire burning brightly inside a trash pile in the middle of the street. “This was my first apartment in New York,” he said, pointing to a window upstairs. Now he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two young daughters. I live in Brooklyn, too, with my husband and son. The idea that we were going to see the riots played out in front of us made us giddy, like strangers had graciously decided to act out our childhood home movies.

The beneficent reënactor was a film company shooting a scene from “Ten Thousand Saints,” a movie version of the Eleanor Henderson novel about straight-edge kids in the late-eighties East Village. Her characters stumble upon the 1988 riot between police officers trying to enforce the park’s curfew and anarchist squatters wanting to continue living there in a tent city. “And they’re like, whoa,” in the words of a production assistant that Jason and I talked to.

The boxy, bright-blue police cars were perfect, and there were several actors dressed in police uniforms of the era. One sat on a police horse. Others, in riot gear, milled around. But we were not impressed with the extras. Inside the park, there were about twenty “anarchists” walking around looking nothing like the menacing figures of our youth. They wore an assortment of punk signifiers—one man’s hair was crafted into a Mohawk, others wore combat boots. But they seemed far too healthy and clean-cut as they stood around glumly holding white signs, with slogans like “Gentrification is Genocide” written with a Sharpie.

One man in the gaggle looked more convincing than the others. He was wearing a jacket with a logo for the eighties hardcore band Sheer Terror, and a backward black baseball cap. He had neck and face tattoos, including one that read “Queens” in elaborate script, and two teardrop tattoos under one eye. He identified himself as Danny Diablo, a hardcore musician and native New Yorker who lived near the park at the time of the riots.

“No way,” he said, when asked if he took part in the original riots. “I was a hardcore kid. I didn’t care about politics. My friends are drinking at a bar by here. I hope they don’t come and give me a hard time for doing this.” Asked what the sign he carried said, he appeared embarrassed. It compared Mayor Ed Koch to Hitler. “I actually love Ed Koch,” he said. Next to Diablo, a longhaired man wearing a heavy black leather jacket with fringe chimed in, “Why am I in this jacket? Isn’t it supposed to be August?” He shrugged. He’d answered a casting call. He was just going to go with it.

In a surreal twist, the extras on the film—directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, and starring Ethan Hawke and Emily Mortimer—had been told to make no noise, so as not to disturb local residents. When the protestors began to rehearse protesting, they only silently raised and lowered their signs, shaking their fists, and opening and closing their mouths to yell mutely.

The production assistants were tyrannical. One told onlookers, “Step—carefully, please—over that tube of fog, and stand over there.” We complied, stepping gingerly over the fog tube. “Go around, please!” a production assistant ordered us soon after. In the light rain that was beginning to fall, Jason and I obediently went through the park, and crossed the street to watch from under an awning.

Again, a production assistant appeared. “You can watch. But I’m going to need you to clear a path down the sidewalk!” he said wearily. We looked back and forth at the empty sidewalk. “And unless you live at 150 East Seventh Street, I suggest you give them back their front door!” A couple with a baby took that as their cue to go home. A photographer from the International Business Times lowered his camera, cursed, and left. We considered chanting “No justice, no peace!” and “Whose sidewalk? Our sidewalk!” But we got the feeling that no one else would find that funny, and did as we were told.